We released Draft Mode two weeks ago to allow you to prepare a model without publishing it immediately. We haven't really heard any feedback on it, which makes me wonder if it 'just works' for everyone? What do you think?

It's interesting to see that you both missed this news. This makes me curious about the effectiveness of our communications: we mentioned this on the blog, in our last newsletter, and it's also on the News Feed (see image below).

Do you ever look at or see these? Do you have any suggestions about how we could do better?

Well , I did not completely miss the news .. I caught it here in the forums eventually. This is in fact where I find all news since anything posted in the other Sketchfab website sections like artist spotlights, competitions , API updates etc .. is normally shared in here as well which I feel is great.

I actually never really see the news feed because Im using Google chrome and the google chrome default page has icons for most frequently visited sites. Sketchfab is one of these icons but the link it cached is the one your site used to do a redirect to eg : "https://sketchfab.com/models/popular"

So that is the page I land on which I normally follow by either going to staff picked or my own page for something and then the forums.

Sorry @bartv if I answer late to your initial question. I just saw that topic thank to a research in order to avoid duplicates. This days I prepare a big scene and I take time to manage every aspect of the settings. I try things to select the best possible display and so I discovers some draft mode limitations we could be improved in my opinion. So, I propose and you dispose!

First, to understand the importance of these points, we must take into account the system of “followers” : actually, when you officially publish your scene, all your followers are notified. So, the aim of the draft mode seems to be the possibility to completely check your scene quality before its release - before anybody else could notice fixable glitches. It’s particularly important for professionnal uses.
So, what could be improved?:

I believe it can be useful to be allowed to share the link of your draft scene to someone else with or without sketchfab account. So, you could check the display with colleagues on different machines, more or less performant, before publishing. I already had to share my account with a friend to have his opinion… The goal isn’t to be an hidden copy of the premium users’ private option and it could have some specific limitations:

The user can’t have so many draft models as he wants whereas premium members could have numerous private ones.

The user isn’t allowed to know how many people saw his scene. No statistic of this kind on draft models.

Obviously, no one can like draft models or put them into collections…

I saw a topic for this but I believe that this find its place here : That could be useful to be allowed to download your draft scene from sketchfab. Then, you can check what could be downloaded by users after the publish (When you plan to allow the download, of course). If everything is in order into the Zip file : maps and fbx names, folders, metadata, weight of the archive… To avoid any surprise at the moment of publishing.

My draft scene is displayed in SD and I have to choose HD in order to see something else than just blurry stains of color on too much smooth meshes. I believe to understand that the small resolutions of the textures are generated only after the publishing. But that is stressful to validate the publish without any upstream LD/SD check. Mainly because you have to wait some hours to really see the final aspect of your scene because it takes time to Sketchfab to compute the small maps. May these small maps could be generated from the upload of the draft ? Furthermore, that can also avoid first viewers to see a blurred version of your work…

And the bonus, because it concerns the settings of any scene, draft or not. I would appreciate the existence of a “Replace” function in the textures inventory, in order to update a version of a map in all slots where it is called at once. For now, we have to relink it everywhere by hand. This could be very helpful when you work on your settings in order to find the best compromise between good looking and performances.